


Tactile Feedback

by domesticadventures



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Episode: s11e03 The Bad Seed, Gen, Headspace, M/M, Season/Series 11
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-28
Updated: 2015-10-28
Packaged: 2018-04-28 13:28:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5092502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/domesticadventures/pseuds/domesticadventures
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This body is yours, now, Jimmy absent and only your grace occupying it. If it does not belong to you, to whom does it belong?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tactile Feedback

**Author's Note:**

> If you want this to be slightly less upsetting,* you can read it as a precursor to my [11x03 coda](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5055844).
> 
> *results not guaranteed

Your brother asks, “What are you?”

For a moment, you don’t know how to respond. Truth be told, you haven’t known for a long time now. What you do know, in some unquantifiable way, is that you are not the same Castiel who appeared to Dean in that barn just those few short years ago.

Later, you will feel your brother’s hate in every touch of his knife to your skin as he threatens to cut off your body parts. There will be a part of you that starts to argue, that says, _No, not yours, your vessel’s, this flesh is not your home--_

But no. This body is yours, now, Jimmy absent and only your grace occupying it, keeping it from rotting away into nothing. If it does not belong to you, to whom does it belong?

“I’m an angel of the Lord,” you lie.

\--

The curse is digging deeper, down into the core of you. You feel like you’re being torn apart from the inside out. It isn’t the first time. Your entire existence has felt like a fall in slow motion.

You wake up on the floor in a daze after it finally overwhelms you. Sam and Dean have their hands on your arms, your shoulders. They keep touching you, hands everywhere, without ever getting close enough for you to lean on them. It’s always like this, though: they do their best to pull you up, but ultimately, you have to stand on your own.

Dean asks, “You know where you are?”

_Home,_ you want to say, but you’re not that much of an optimist.

“Earth,” you say, instead.

\--

It feels good, for a while, your hands around her throat. It feels like exactly what you’re meant to be doing, right up until the moment that Dean is there and saying, “This isn’t you.”

_This isn’t you,_ he says, and then you’re looking down at your hands and wondering, not for the first time, if they are your hands. But of course they are: your hands grabbing Dean by the collar, your hands connecting with the side of his face, your hands collecting his blood on your knuckles. That isn’t the first time, either.

Your hands are doing things you don’t want without your permission. But they are still your hands.

\--

When the terror of the counter-curse subsides and you come to, Dean’s hands are everywhere. They are on your arms and shoulders and neck, they are cradling your face, they are pulling you up off the floor.

It’s almost worth it, all of the pain and suffering, all of the guilt you feel as you see the wounds on Dean’s face and match them to the feel of blood on your hands, for these few seconds of being touched like someone actually gives a shit about you.

You look at Dean and you think, not for the first time, _I wish this meant that you loved me._

\--

“Dean,” you say, “I can fix that.”

“No,” he says, “no no no no.” It makes sense, you suppose: you can’t undo what you did. Why should you be allowed to erase the evidence?

You remember the way Dean had looked at you, like you were a rabid dog, like he was afraid of you. How could you forget? That must be why he shies away from you, even now, just like always. His hands are on the ice pack, on his beer, they are hanging at his sides. His hands have better places to be than anywhere near you.

You pull away from him like he asks. You keep your hands to yourself.


End file.
